Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

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Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803) was a French writer, army officer and diplomat. He is best known for the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), published in 1782.

He was born in Amiens into a middle‑class family and trained as an artillery officer at the School of Artillery of La Fère. As a young lieutenant, he served in garrisons during the Seven Years’ War and later held posts in Strasbourg, Grenoble and Besançon. He became a Freemason in 1763.

While serving, Laclos wrote poems and the libretto for the opéra comique Ernestine, which premiered in 1777 but was not successful. He helped start a new artillery school in Valence, where Napoleon Bonaparte would study later.

In 1782 his novel Les Liaisons dangereuses made him famous. He married Marie-Soulange Duperré in 1786.

With the onset of the French Revolution, Laclos left the army for a time and worked for the Duke of Orléans, doing diplomacy. He edited a political journal in 1790–91 and helped reorganize the army. He contributed to the French victory at Valmy. In 1793 he was arrested as an Orleanist but was released after the Thermidorian Reaction in 1794.

He studied ballistics and is associated with work on artillery shells. He tried to return to the army in 1795 but was unsuccessful. He later joined Napoleon and was back in the army in 1800 as a Brigadier General in the Rhine campaign, taking part in the Battle of Biberach.

In 1803 he became commander of Reserve Artillery in Italy. He died in Taranto on 5 September 1803, probably from dysentery or malaria, and was buried at Forte de Laclos on the Isola di San Paolo near Taranto.

Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses remains a major work of 18th‑century literature and has inspired many plays, films and studies about love and power in high society.